Clima for iPhone

It’s been a while since I wrote about a weather app. The weather in Mumbai is pretty crazy right now with tons of rain throughout the day. The monsoon season in probably the only time weather apps are useful in Mumbai. Apps are allowed to just display hell and fire for the rest of the year. As you probably already know, I have tons of weather apps installed on my phone and love trying new ones. Clima by Juanma Altamirano is a great weather app that has some excellent animations.

While most minimal weather apps tend to have static screens designed brilliantly, Clima is full of playful animations and a lovely gesture driven interface. On launch the colour bar background ripples from top to bottom as it fetches the weather and every little bit of information is displayed with a bounce effect. The main weather view just displays the temperature and weather condition using a Climacon. The interface is minimally deceptive. Swiping the main view to the right displays the hourly forecast. Every view switch is followed by a nice animation for the weather data. This view can also display wind and rainfall information by tapping anywhere. The weekly forecast view is a left swipe away from the main view. Tapping the main view reveals the sunrise and sunset details along with current precipitation, wind conditions, and chance of rain. The animation here seems inspired from Yahoo Weather. Tapping and holding anywhere will have the weather read out to you by the built in text to voice system. Pulling down anywhere will display the location menu that also allows you to access the settings and about sections of the app.

Clima sources its weather data from OpenWeatherMap. It even has support for weather notifications that can be configured with various conditions. The notifications are all local notifications and not server driven push notifications, so they require the app to run in the background constantly. Even small things like the information and about pages have been designed well and they fit perfectly with the rest of the app. I never thought I’d see an app have such a good looking legal section with credit for open source code. I love the custom sharing implementation that blurs the current view and has big bold buttons for Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook slide in from the sides. Units of wind and temperature can be changed in the app settings.

I’m really impressed by the attention to detail in Clima. I love everything about it and didn’t even think that was possible given the bazillion weather apps reviewed. I only hope a future update adds support for forecast.io data because that seems to be the most accurate overall. Clima is an absolute steal for just $0.99 on the App Store and is absolutely worth buying.